Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)
askageologist.blogspot.com
askageologist.blogspot.com
You wouldn't want to drill into the magma chamber to relieve pressure, instead you would drill next to the magma chamber to cool the rocks on the edge, shrinking the chamber. Every few decades after the chamber had shrunk, you'd drill a new set of boreholes closer. The expense would be substantial, but well within the range of major government projects, and if you use the heat for power generation you can recover some of that cost - indeed if you subsidize the initial logistical setup, the long term operation can likely be fiscally self sustaining.
you go poking fairly stable systems and they will become unstable for us fairly quickly and uncontrollably.
>> What is Yellowstone National Park doing to stop or prevent an erruption?
> Nothing can be done to prevent an eruption. The temperatures, pressures, physical characteristics of partially molten rock, and immensity of the magma chamber are beyond human ability to impact—much less control.
In my head, some staff geologist, tired of answering dumb questions, was asked and finally snapped a little.
https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate...
Yup, Project Plowshare (US) and Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (USSR) looked a lot of interesting/crazy ideas for non-military applications for nuclear weapons.
Some of the ideas were just nuts for use on earth (like making bays) but if we ever do start setting up shop on another planet, like Mars, nuclear detonations could probably be used for construction efforts early on to get some serious work done quickly - Project Orion, especially if done with materials mined from the asteroid belt, could be an extremely viable option for interstellar travel even if just for probes.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Plowshare
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Natio...
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsio...
NASA estimates the Martian atmosphere is ~2.5e16 kgs[0]. Current estimate[1] is that the Martian atmosphere loses 2-3 kg/s. Presently losing something on the order of 1e-9 percentage per day. I think if humans ever have the ability to thicken the Martian atmosphere, we can cover the loss.
[0] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.htm... [1] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2018.05.030
21340 km of superconducting tape could take rather some time to fabricate. Then, of course you need to get it there, and lay it out, and construct 20k refrigeration plants. Then, extract enough nitrogen from the atmosphere (1.89% concentration) for refrigerant; you'll need about 4M tons of it. You also need 21340 km of cryo-safe piping bonded to the tape, which probably weighs another 4M tons. Plus heat insulation.
Leakage from 21340 km of tubing, even if just migration of single molecules through the walls of the tube, would require continuous injection of fresh nitrogen.
And, I guess, you had better protect it from meteorite strikes. A planet-sized magnetic field suddenly imploding would seem to release enough energy to vaporize your whole tape. Maybe you should have two of them, parallel, 100km apart so they are unlikely to both be taken out by the same meteorite.
Not in any appreciable amount over human timescales.
Well, any of them where emplacing a million tons of TNT might be problematic
The makers of the documentary also chose an excellent score to accompany their organic capture of a moving love story along with the antics of a plucky group of misfits that came together in a crisis. It's the sort of thing you can only shake your head at and say, "Only in reality!" because if you saw it in a movie you'd just think "Nah, that could never happen".
The related 2000 documentary 'Space Cowboys' also provides excellent insights into how generation-Boomer skills can be invaluable when modern computer systems fail catastrophically.
Maybe they should have nuked Exxon's corporate headquarters in response the the Valdez disaster, which might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon disaster by teaching all the remaining oil companies a lesson.
When you drill down into the volcano, the hole just collapses on itself and plugs itself back up. The closer you get to the caldera, the rock become viscous and hot. Not only does your drill bit melt, but it's like trying to a hole into warming ice-cream - you don't accomplish anything.
Geothermal energy plants function by drilling holes near magma chambers, and allowing some heat to radiate into the bore hole, and then up the shaft. ...and while this process extracts some heat, the energy withdrawn is orders of magnitude smaller than what is present.
Same with modern day oil holes. They just reinforce the walls of the hole with concrete. Much harder problem is to prevent oil and gas from rushing up through the well, and breaking the rig (it always ignites afterwards). Imagine that with lava.
I would think rocks under high pressure would do the same thing. You’d either have to dig a conical hole to get a cylindrical bore, or the boring machine would have to have cutters on both the face and the sides to keep grinding away rock that expands into the void you are creating.
Think boiling water vs thick oatmeal vs boiling a pressure cooker until it explodes, but obviously worse.
So "relieve pressure" in this case isn't like a pressure release valve on a water heater.
You'd need to either cool the mass, remove the overburden, or create some sort of massive voids for expansion.
The US nuclear test done in Mississippi resulted in vaporizing the rock and soil and creating a large underground void, for whatever that's worth as a sort of proof of concept.
Where did the vaporized rock and soil go?
"What are you, the rock police? I put'em up on my a**. How's that?"
I'm pressing X to doubt.
The whole reason supervolcanoes are what they are is that the material can't sufficiently flow faster than pressure builds.
Converting that material to an escaping gas at scale would be an unbelievably successful technological achievement.
It'd be like trying to suck a mix of layers of that boiling oatmeal and playdough through a straw.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/iceland#energy-mix
But, as it being listed as 'other renewable' hints, it doesn't make as much sense elsewhere, where generally you can just install more solar and wind and save more carbon/money that way, and leave worrying about windless nights till you've picked the low hanging fruit.
For example, the current US plan is that after getting to 95% carbon free energy, to switch the focus to electrifying more things that currently burn fuel directly, rather than worry about that awkward last 5% before they need to.
Large-scale geothermal installations are not pretty and they cover large areas of land. The individual bore holes must be widely separated from each other, so if you are aggregating the energy of many bores, you are building giant pipe networks. It looks a bit like a large oil field. This gets attacked by environmental activists as despoiling the natural habitat/beauty etc of the formerly undeveloped land. In places like Nevada, which has a lot of geothermal power, there is nothing attractive or unique about this land, it is essentially volcanic badlands of the boring variety, but the campaigns against them use deceptive pictures from other parts of the country suggesting that they are paving over national parks and similar.
This propaganda against geothermal power generation makes it impractical at scale. Instead, the geothermal power plants that are practical to build in this regulatory environment are all solutions with small land footprints. The largest geothermal power plant in Nevada is <100 MW and most don't even do 20 MW.
Of course, there are similar challenges when trying to install solar power at scale in the same kinds of places. Too much of our "green energy" policy is dictated by activists that don't want to build any kind of power generation anywhere.
That is not a triumph of ecoterror, but of economics: solar and wind are already substantically cheaper, and continue getting much cheaper, where geothermal, like nukes, stays just as expensive to build and operate as ever. So, pace baseload, a dollar spent today is overwhelmingly better spent on a solar panel or wind turbine, or, soon, storage for solar and wind, or production of H2 as feedstock for industrial processes and hydrocarbon synthesis from captured CO2.
There is never any need to install new solar or wind in wilderness. Both coexist productively and synergistically with current agricultural land use. A farm or pasture with solar is more agriculturally productive than the same without, and also generates clean power. In effect, the power output subsidizes construction of the shading infrastructure that reduces heat stress and evaporation.
A wind turbine displaces minimal ground area, and thus may be in the middle of a solar farm, both situated in current, productive cropland. Output may be used locally to produce ammonia when spot prices bottom out, useful on-site for both fertilizer and fuel.
It's also unstable and inconsistent. Ground water changes, magma movement, hole collapses, all make it an unreliable source of power.
My recollection is that the big issue with geothermal is the minerals leaching out of the drilled rocks and fairly rapidly fouling the near/above-round equipment or depositing on the tubes/pipes closing them down. I understand that progress had been made; if anyone has more details handy, could you post links?
There are some really cool innovations with graphene coatings generating power as hot saltwater flows over it, simplifying power generation by basically creating giant linear convection flows(, as well as graphene coatings on bits to increase durability.) The technology has a ways to go to compete with solar or coal or gas if grid proximity isn't a problem.
When Mount St Helens exploded, it released about 1.0e11 MJ of energy. The earth receives 21MJ of energy from the sun, per day, per square meter. So MSH in total released as much energy in total as a square of land 70km on a side receives in a single day from the sun. Which isn't tiny, but is a relative drop in the bucket compared to the whole planet.
Considering that this hypothetical heat source would be very concentrated and so would radiate to space efficiently and not spread out as much, I wouldn't expect it to have much of any effect on the climate.
I'm quite aware of the fact that the earth is older than written records of the earth.
Yes, they are. You're probably thinking of pyroclastic flow, which is also quite violent on its own. It's the waterfall of everything in the eruption column falling back to earth, and contains solid and molten rock, ash, deadly chemicals, and superheated gas, all traveling at hundreds of miles per hour.
>>A supervolcano is a volcano that has had an eruption with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 8, the largest recorded value on the index. This means the volume of deposits for such an eruption is greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles).
The most recent supervolcano eruption was what formed Lake Taupo, New Zealand:
>>The Oruanui eruption of the Taupō Volcano was the world's largest known eruption in the past 70,000 years, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8. It occurred around 26,500 years ago and generated approximately 430 km3 (100 cu mi) of pyroclastic fall deposits, 320 km3 (77 cu mi) of pyroclastic density current (PDC) deposits (mostly ignimbrite) and 420 km3 (100 cu mi) of primary intracaldera material, equivalent to 530 km3 (130 cu mi) of magma.
>>Modern Lake Taupō partly fills the caldera generated during this eruption. Tephra from the eruption covered much of the central North Island with ignimbrite up to 200 m (660 ft) deep.
I can well attest to that. A year or so after the major eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, I had business in both Portland and Seattle and on that occasion I drove from Portland to Seattle rather than fly, as I'd normally do. (I'd been to Tektronix to whinge about ongoing problems we'd been having with a PAL 625 TV sync pulse generator—an interesting story in itself but I'll leave that for another time).
I live an ocean away—thousands of miles from Portland but I had an ulterior motive for renting a vehicle in Portland and driving to Seattle, as this time I wanted to visit and drive over the 'renewed' Tacoma Narrows bridge which replaced the infamous Galloping Gertie that failed in 1940—of which I'd learned so much about years earlier in structures and physics. Having a vehicle made that possible. Visiting Mt St Helens wasn't on my agenda—and I'd already seen it post the 1980 eruption from a commercial SFO/SEA flight although I did expect to see it in the distance to the east from the I5.
It was somewhat latish afternoon, 3:30–4:00 pm, when I arrived at my nearest point on the I5 to Mt St Helens and unexpectedly nearby there was a small airfield. Signs on the highway indicated that a company was offering joy flights to Mt St Helens, so on-the-spur-of-the-moment I decided to take the flight. Unfortunately, I was the only one wanting a flight at that time and the pilot told me that it was uneconomic to take only one person (two being the minimum) so I'd have to wait until additional sightseers turned up—and if that didn't happen soon (within 15 or so minutes) then it'd be too late in the day to fly! Anyway, I struck a deal at somewhat less than the amount for two people and we were on our way.
I don't need to describe this remarkable scene except to say it was spectacular—much more so than the somewhat limited view from the commercial jet; and anyone who's interested will already be familiar with the wonderful photos in National Geographic and elsewhere. However, one point I must comment on is that for mile after mile in this desolate lunar-mud-like landscape the remaining trunks of the flattened pine trees were all facing radially away from the exit point of the explosion like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, it was one of the strangest sights I've ever seen. There was no doubt that this was an extremely huge explosion.
After doing the standard joy flight, the pilot suggested that seeing I'd paid much more than the normal fare would I like him to take me closer to the crater. Gleefully, I agreed and we not only got closer to the crater but we actually flew around inside it — right, the crater is truly huge when one's actually inside it! When the author says it took him nearly 'six hours to walk out of the center of the crater' he not exaggerating one iota.
'Tis a damn shame photos aren't allowed on HN, otherwise I'd post some of my old slides taken from inside the crater (they're truly spectacular).
Maybe volcanologists who don't think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a peeved hydrogen bomb up close.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2000/fs036-00/
USGS estimated the blast from Mt. St. Helens was 7 megatons and 17 megatons of other thermal energy released (I guess most of that is magma flowing out).
The early large fusion bombs are comparable to that, actually bigger. The largest one ever tested was 50 megatons and had a design capable of 100 megatons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtCTzbh4mNQ.
Well, at minimum, that's still between 400 and 700 times the energy released during the Hiroshima explosion. That's over two magnitudes more energy and I'm glad I wasn't anywhere near it at the time. ;-)
The Tsar Bomba (which I remember as a kid) had to be made to prove a point but as Kurchatov, Sakharov etc. seemed to realize at the time, making the 100 megaton bomb wouldn't add much to the argument (presumably other than additional cost). There was no point making a bigger bomb as the additional energy essentially would have been blown out into space thus not substantially increasing the blast area.
Anyway, that's not the point which is that even on piddling little earth nature has ways of producing huge amounts of destructive energy. As for supernovas, etc. except by way of mathematical calculations, I don't think the average human can actually contemplate or imagine energy on such a scale.
The Americans made bombs larger than St. Helens too.
I hiked up to the rim of MSH a couple decades ago, but didn't go down into it. I can attest that it's pretty big in there. And the sight of the giant blown-down trees for miles around is incredible.
(When a kid, my parents' home was within five minutes walking distance of a national park: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/visit-a-park/parks/blue.... In effect, it was our backyard and in those days we could get into all sorts of trouble without helicopter parents bothering us or cramping our style, (back then it was common for us kids at the age of 10 or 11 to go roaming in those valleys without supervision). However, there were no active volcanoes, the nearest to my home being about 20 miles away and it has been dormant for millions of years: https://www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/visit-a-park/parks/moun....)
When you mentioned that you were hiking at MSH several decades ago, it suddenly dawned on me that that flight of mine was 40 years ago (hell those years seem to have disappeared quickly). As I said, what I saw was nothing but destruction and desolation, but presumably by the time of your visit some 20 years later you would have seen new growth starting to take hold everywhere. Even so, from some pictures I've just seen on the web, 40 years still isn't long enough for nature to hide the event.
I shouldn't be allowed to sort and cull my own photos as I'm too possessive of them and I don't trust other members of my family or friends who are in the photos to do so either (as they've been known to spirit away technically excellent photographs of themselves that don't show them in a flattering light).
Then there's the entropy problem: in say a bracket of photos the ones with the best focus, composure etc. don't necessarily have the best exposure, color balance etc. so I can't decide what to discard and so keep putting off the hard cull (at least 3/4 of them need to go).
However, in the interim, I found this site (and I'm sure there are many more with a bit of looking): https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/eruption-mount-st-helens-19.... This site has some excellent photos and many of the aerial shots are very similar to mine. (If anyone else has found similar sites then post links here.)
I draw your attention to the photos with descriptions that begin the following commentary:
• 'Aerial view of timber blowdown, destroyed by the May 18 eruption...' and the two images (one removed) underneath it.
• 'Mount St. Helens, shortly after the eruption of May 18, 1980.' — compare this with the first two images of the volcano before it exploded and you'll get some idea of how much of the side of the volcano blew out during the eruption.
• 'The slopes of Smith Creek valley, east of Mount St. Helens, show trees blown down by the May 18, 1980 lateral blast.'
• 'Denuded trees lay like matchsticks in the changed landscape around Mount St. Helens, shown two days after the eruption, on May 20, 1980.'
• The last image 'Satellites in orbit and scientists on the ground still monitor the mountain and track the recovery of Mt. St. Helens.' puts it all into perspective. Imagine me in the plane flying out of the crater (through airspace that had been previously solid rock) and been confronted with the 'matchstick' alignment of tree trunks radiating out from the new 'mouth' of the crater. The 'spokes of the wheel' alignment I mentioned was very obvious at this point.
Unfortunately, the panorama I saw from the plane's window was not be easily captured at the time by me or others as most of us didn't own cameras that could take panoramic images. The 4:3 aspect ratio of old camera images somewhat detracted from this amazing spectacle.
...Back to searching. :-)
Yes, but I'm going to need a bigger drill . . .
But RTFA anyway, it's a good read, and a little unsettling how many problems people think could be solved with just a bit of nuclear bombing.
I'm pretty sure the Earth's atmoshphere is physically incapable of differentiating between man-released CO2 and naturally released CO2.
>> man-made emmisions require permit
Whose permit? On what authority? Even if such permit would be required, who would deny it if the alternative was literally the destruction of a large portion of the United States(if we are talking about Yellowstone exploding)?
I am sure that a minimum of the US Geological Survey and ACE will be involved in any supervolcano remediation plan. And probably FEMA but hopefully they won't need to act. ;)
Naturally released CO2 is harmless. There is a difference!
Eh? You are aware that if Yellowstone were to erupt it would literally mean the destruction of the United States. How is "defusing" the vulcano by detonating nukes "more dangerous" exactly?
>>Naturally released CO2 is harmless.
Again, atmosphere doesn't care - CO2 is CO2. Yes it doesn't count towards calculations that we currently do to model climate predictions, but it's not harmless, and a supervulcano event will fuck everything up, it doesn't magically stop having an effect just because it's natural.
Natural eruption would considerably reduce man made CO2 emmisions in near future. And nuclear winter from dust could stop global warming!
I imagine this is technically accurate, as an eruption of for example Yellowstone would utterly destroy most human civilization in North America.
Definitely impactful but not civilization ending.